The Microsoft Cloud and Your Startup, See the Whole Picture

Consider the very old parable of a group of blind men examining an elephant, as described by Wikipedia:

“The story of the blind men and an elephant originated in the Indian subcontinent from where it has widely diffused. It is a story of a group of blind men (or men in the dark) who touch an elephant to learn what it is like. Each one feels a different part, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then compare notes and learn that they are in complete disagreement.”

The point, of course, is that without a complete picture of the elephant, each man formed strong opinions based entirely upon their limited, in this case tactile, experience.

Which brings me to Office 365 as a SaaS platform and Azure as your IaaS and PaaS provider.

Nearly all of cloud industry excitement (and declarations of disruption) is generated by, for example, containers, serverless computing and blockchain and these are indeed very brightly shining stars. Often overlooked is the transformative power of SaaS offerings such as Office 365.

What’s being missed is the potential for enterprise workflow transformation, built on Office 365, that fulfills the cloud’s promise of (among other principles) speed, agility and scalability.